GE Reveals Engine That Could Make Aerion's Ambitious Supersonic Business Jet Take Flight

An illustration of Aerion's planned supersonic business jet.Martin Deja

General Electric has completed initial design work on an engine for Aerion, the companies announced Monday, a significant step forward toward Aerion's goal of developing a supersonic business jet. The company also revealed plans to follow it with larger planes, including, potentially, a commercial airliner.

The engine will be a twin-shaft, twin-fan turbofan that will meet the stringent landing and takeoff noise requirements that will take effect for aircraft certified after 2020, said Brad Mottier, GE Aviation’s head of business and general aviation, at the National Business Aviation Association convention in Orlando. Amid concerns over the environmental impact of the high fuel burn of supersonic flight, Aerion CEO Tom Vice said the Aerion AS2’s emissions will also be 20% to 50% better than current standards for the aircraft class.

David Richardson, director of air vehicle design at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division, which is working with Aerion to develop the 12-passenger plane, said that the finalization of the engine specs allows for Skunk Works to move on from conceptual work to developing a prelimary design. He sees no major technical hurdles ahead. “There are no showstoppers, there are no technologies that have to be invented for us to get to where we need to be to make this airplane happen,” said Richardson.

The plane is designed to have a range of 4,200 nautical miles at Mach 1.4, and the companies are working to develop the ability to fly supersonic up to Mach 1.2 over land without a sonic boom hitting the ground.

The FAA will begin collecting data as early as the end of 2020 to study permitting supersonic flight over land, but Aerion says their business case isn’t predicated on any changes to existing regulations. “The AS2 is responsibly efficient subsonic and supersonic,” said Vice.

Aerion is a passion project for billionaire Robert Bass, who’s financially supported the Reno, Nevada-based company to date. Vice said that suppliers are also investing in the program and there have been discussions with third-party investors. Debt and equity offerings could come after the company completes the preliminary design process in June 2020, he said.

Aerion plans to make a first flight in 2023. The list price is $120 million, almost two times more expensive than the most expensive large business jets. It’s not clear what the market will be for greater speed at such a high price.

Aerion expects to sell 300 aircraft over 10 years and 500 in total.

The aerospace consultant Rolland Vincent said those numbers are in line with his forecasts for the supersonic market. "Speed is clearly the next frontier in business aviation, and the AS2 design addresses an unserved sweet spot in the market that will eventually attract other OEMs to the space," he said.

Vice described plans to build larger variants dubbed As3, AS4 and AS5, including commercial airliners, though Vice said the company's vision for an airliner won't resemble current ones. “Do you really have to carry 55, a hundred or 300 people?” asked Vice. “We think there’s a variant of an airliner that carries the first-class cabin, for example: that's how we think of AS3 and AS4.”

The high cost of engine development and the likely thinness of the market, at least to start, make the engine a tricky balancing act for Aerion and the other supersonic aircraft aspirants, Boom and Spike, leading to a reduction in speed from initial plans. The GE engine class, dubbed Affinity, is based on a core adapted from the best-selling airliner engine of all-time, the CFM56. It’s the first supersonic engine developed in 55 years since the Concorde.

GE's planned Affinity supersonic engineCourtesy of General Electric

Mottier said it was a tall order to come up with a design that could be efficient in both supersonic and subsonic flight, with two years on conceptual work to thread that needle.

“It’s a hybrid between how you get your efficiency on an airliner and a fighter engine,” he said.

Given the relatively small production numbers envisioned by Aerion for the AS2 (building 500 of the trijets would mean 1,500 engines), GE Aviation isn’t going ahead with development of just for that plane alone. “We don’t view this as one application,” Mottier said.

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